Taking a step back, this assignment was a first for me in a lot of ways. This was my first digital game. This was my first game I’ve made solo. This was my first visual novel (or rather, a game that wasn’t centered around traditional, competitive “gamelike” mechanics)! For these reasons – and many more non-first ones – this experience was a very educational one for me!
Being a narrative-heavy game, I spent a large portion of my time reviewing the four narrative techniques, and how they can best guide the story. With “evocative spaces” and “enacting stories” as my two heavy-hitters, I tried to focus the limited mechanics I had access to (dialogue, text choices, visual/asset information and cues) to support this lore building as best as I could and create the dynamics that I knew the player needed to progress through a meaningful story. However, it was also through my player difficulties that I saw these techniques in action most! For much of my game, I hid information in fear it would “spoil” the story – but it was only until it was expressed early, often, and explicitly that players seemed to resonate most deeply with it.
Another thing that particularly interested me was, in making my first digital game, I also experienced a newly-shaped learning curve for design and development! Where analogue games can be difficult to make large leaps in, due to the cumbersome act of physically manufacturing, it was interested to see from the other side how easy analogue have it in initial ideation and prototyping! For digital games, creating the system the game must operate in and making it meaningfully resonant with the player can take a huge swath of initial time, while later iteration can come faster with this already out of the way! Knowing this now, I would definitely change how I would scope each type of project in the future!
Overall, it was a very interesting for me! The hurdle into making my next digital game seems so much smaller now, and I feel so much more capable of actualizing my ideas – and if not, finding the resources I need to do so! While this game was solely an interactive story, I’ll be taking these narrative lessons with me into all walks of games I make.
